Contact centers can provide numerous services to customers, and have been doing so for years. The idea of a contact center queue is not much different from that of standing in line at a bank and waiting to be helped by the next available teller. However, there can be a lot of frustration if the first, second, or even third teller cannot answer a given question or set of questions. The same frustrations have been known to occur in contact centers. A company can gain customer satisfaction if they are able to answer their customers' questions quickly and accurately.
Contact centers, such as Automatic Call Distribution or ACD systems, are employed by many enterprises to service customer contacts. A typical contact center includes a switch and/or server to receive and route incoming packet-switched and/or circuit-switched contacts and one or more resources, such as human agents and automated resources (e.g., Interactive Voice Response (IVR) units), to service the incoming contacts.
As products and problems become more complex and diverse in nature, a single agent often no longer has all of the skills or expertise to fully service customer contacts. To service customer contacts more effectively, the contact center has dedicated Subject Matter Experts or SMEs, who are highly trained agents in a given aspect of a business. For example, contact centers that handle computer customer service may have application SMEs, hardware SMEs, operating system SMEs, network SMEs, etc. While SMEs are well qualified to answer questions on their particular subject(s), they are often unqualified to answer questions involving subjects outside of their respective specialties.
It is a primary objective of a contact center to provide the best possible service to each individual customer while constantly evaluating and addressing the needs of all contacting customers. This service can best be achieved by offering high-quality technical assistance from a qualified agent coupled with a minimal queue wait time for a customer. In order to facilitate a higher level of service, more qualified agents may be trained as SMEs in various specialties.
Specifically, the best training scenarios involve witnessing how real-world situations are addressed by experienced SMEs. Although simulations can provide a basic level of comprehension in problem solving, real-world scenarios offer insight on how to address unforeseeable issues that may arise in a true customer service contact environment. Additionally, a trainee may benefit from being exposed, in increasing levels of involvement, to a customer and the corresponding service interaction. Unfortunately, this type of high-quality training takes valuable time and resources away from the contact center workflow and may negatively affect the level of immediately available customer service.
Thus, it is a long-felt need in contact center architecture to team trainees with experienced agents and/or SMEs in handling real-world contacts together at a time convenient to each of the agents as well as the customer and the contact center.